The project

Lecture For Every One is a short artistic intervention consisting of a text that Sarah Vanhee or another performer brings/performs at occasions where people are anyway already gathered in order to discuss/exchange/undertake something together. She intrudes into existent situations that are strange to her, and where she herself is a stranger. The text is exactly the same on all the occasions. Some examples: a sales meeting in a luxury hotel, a city council, a team meeting at a multinational, a high society club, the army, a union meeting, an informal meeting of antique collectors, a choir rehearsal, a football training of homeless people etc. Mostly there is only one person within the organization that knows of her coming, for the others it’s a total surprise. She grafts Lecture For Every One onto the meeting, in a moment where there is the necessary concentration and focus, e.g. just before a meeting starts. When the lecture is done, she leaves immediately.
In the text, she tries to address citizens both collectively and individually, avoiding the rhetorics known from political messages, mass media, advertising, rules and laws, in an attempt to speak “freely”, in a gesture that addresses both the individual and the collective, and considers our contemporary (Western) society as a co-creation of “every-one”.

Intention, by Sarah Vanhee

Is it possible, in an increasingly atomized society undergoing constant and transformative “crises”, to address people collectively in ways other than laws and regulations, simplistic political messages, mainstream media and advertisements? Lecture For every One is an attempt to do so.

Lecture For Every One is a text that me or another person will perform in different places where people are already gathered: places where people discuss, exchange, undertake something professionally, privately or publicly, e.g. a parish council, a company’s “jour fix”, a formal sitting, a trade union assembly, a training session, a neighbourhood committee, a sport club, an official opening, a self-help group, an international business meeting, an academic conference, or any other such assemblage. I invite myself to these gatherings: as a guest, a stranger, an intruder, a parasite, a Trojan Horse I ask for or “hijack” fifteen minutes of their agenda. Just before, during or after the actual meeting, I “give” a Lecture For Every One, thereby injecting a number of issues into the existing space.

Lecture For Every One is a hybrid of stories, political reflections and performative momentum.
In the text I address some of my concerns about our living together, about the state of the common in our societies, about current forces operating upon the human condition. I rethink an ethics of living together, and I try to propose “fictions” other than those prevailing in our contemporary Western societies.

Lecture For Every One is a personal and an artistic gesture, a simple but strange object that enters a certain homogenous environment consisting nevertheless of individuals. It is meant to resonate inside our shared living space that I consider to be a co-creation by every one.

In each of these situations, Lecture For Every One uses exactly the same words.